Adaptive radio research

Programmable semiconductor maker Xilinx has joined forces with Ireland’s Centre for Telecommunications Value Chain Research (CTVR) to support  research into  new telecommunications and networking systems.

The initiative involves a hoped for breakthrough in the field of adaptive radio technology - one of CTVR’s main areas of interest. For example, systems are being explored to enable a mobile phone to ‘intelligently’ alter its radio frequency system to work on any country’s cellular phone network. This would be a major boost to the global telecommunications industry and phone users where several cellular standards currently operate across the world. Handsets that work in one network have to be manually reprogrammed to work in another and in some cases they do not work at all.

The project which Xilinx is supporting is based at Trinity College Dublin, one of a consortium of eight research institutions forming the CTVR which is supported by Science Foundation Ireland and IDA Ireland. CTVR aims to produce the technology that will allow a mobile phone to reconfigure itself automatically to each network.

Trinity is developing the required software and Xilinx will implement that software in their chips.

The CTVR was established to facilitate advanced research in Irish third-level institutions into technologies that will underpin the networking and telecommunications industries of the future. It is supported by public-sector funds and by leading industry partners.

Lucent Bell Labs was the first major industry partner; Xilinx now becomes the second.